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0739462288
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| 0739462288
| 4.14
| 4,583
| Feb 1975
| Jan 2006
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it was amazing
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At his worst Ellison was an overwhelming, self-aggrandising hipster, constantly high on his own supply. At his best he was a mad poet who put Dostoevs
At his worst Ellison was an overwhelming, self-aggrandising hipster, constantly high on his own supply. At his best he was a mad poet who put Dostoevsky to shame. His prose goes from entertainment schlock to bone-cracking levels of emotional weight. Love him, despise him, build golden statues in his honour, throw eggs at his grave and sniff at his legacy. None of it really matters. A phenomenal writer. Always. Forever. One of the best. And this is one of his best collections. 10/10 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 12, 2024
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Jul 08, 2024
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Jun 12, 2024
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0063072645
| 9780063072640
| 0063072645
| 3.82
| 67,429
| Jan 18, 2022
| Jan 18, 2022
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it was amazing
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Recommended to me by the Devil herself: Ashley, who despite being an otherworldly force of indiscriminate terror/whiskey (or maybe because of that) ha
Recommended to me by the Devil herself: Ashley, who despite being an otherworldly force of indiscriminate terror/whiskey (or maybe because of that) has exquisite taste. So I went in completely blind, didn't even read the synopsis and I was swept up in a series of very personal stories of a pandemic/apocalypse. Stories about loss and family life, and loneliness and moving on and deep regret. The pacing suffered a bit here and there, and some bigger sf concepts got a little too abstract to really connect with, but overall a masterfully written piece of science fiction. Like a combination of Dan Simmons and Murakami. If I was to describe this book, I'd say it was like somebody came up with a concept (a mutagenic plague) and then turned that idea into a game of telephone. Where every following story added bizarre and sometimes touching twists to the concept, until the finale where it's both a part of the greater whole and almost completely unrecognisable. It's a story about mutation that mutates itself. It shifts and alters and adapts, changes from strength to strength, going from personal to gigantic, sweeping and dramatic to quiet and self-reflecting. Until the end where it steps back on a celestial scale and looks down with a feeling of warmth and otherworldly tenderness. Very, very interesting. 9/10 ...more |
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Apr 08, 2024
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Apr 20, 2024
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Apr 08, 2024
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B0C4RS4QK4
| 3.53
| 3,039
| Apr 02, 2024
| Apr 02, 2024
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it was amazing
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Evil despises boundaries. Not its boundaries (which must always be respected). Yours, of course. It's just a part of its quirk, really. If evil sees a Evil despises boundaries. Not its boundaries (which must always be respected). Yours, of course. It's just a part of its quirk, really. If evil sees a line it cannot cross it feels compelled to cross it, demolish it. Not because it's particularly invested in your feelings or discomfort (either good or bad) but because you have given it a rule it cannot break, and evil can't have that. I once saw a person online get bullied by internet trolls to the point where they suffered a complete mental breakdown. After this happened some people who took part in the bullying felt remorse. But the most vocal of the bullies tried to rationalise what they had done. They were full of righteous indignation. They were just criticising. Just making jokes. Is it wrong to criticise? Is it wrong to make fun? In fact the person who had been bullied was the clear villain. Why they had done embarrassing and stupid things and so deserved to be punished. Actions have consequences, after-all. But of course not all consequences are valid. Are they? Not all consequences are moral. And justification is not the same as justice. Nature can be cruel, but that doesn't mean all cruelty is natural. But evil seeks a way to normalise evil. To cross those boundaries. And to take you with them. To accept their norm. And that's how you know if you're in the presence of something truly monstrous. It tries to push through, past your defences. Steal your consent. It's not enough that they do something awful. They have to make you complicit. They must not be judged. And you must wallow in their pit. You see something wrong that has happened to somebody, and you get this sick feeling. This twisting in your stomach. A churn. And evil offers up a way to alleviate the guilt. It offers you a price to pay to enjoy all these violent delights. And it's nothing really. Why it's just a tip. It's just a cut. Just a seed. Just 'consequences'. Just accept the normal, natural world. Just let it step in the door. And often when people concede, they soon realise they've let something horrible inside of them. And it grows and devours. And there's no coming back. This utter violation and corruption of boundaries is at the heart of every horror story in Eric LaRocca's most recent collection: This Skin Was Once Mine and Other Disturbances. I was offered a free copy to review, which for me is living the dream. Reading books for free! It's like the library, only I'm at the front of the line. But there's always a price to pay when you read Eric LaRocca's fiction. His work is full of beautifully mutant, flesh-eating concepts and that's why he's so beloved in certain dark and extremely well-red corners of the written world. Eric's got a talent for pricking your brain. I knew I was in for something particularly disturbing when there was a warning before the collection started. I don't remember seeing a warning before his previous books Everything The Darkness Eats and They Were Here Before Us and those were exceptionally disturbing slabs of worm-riddled trauma. So seeing this disclaimer reminded me of the time I once went to the doctor and he produced a particularly intimidating needle. I asked "is this going to hurt" and the doctor looked at me grimly and said "oh yeah." And considering most of the time doctors are trying to convince you stuff won't hurt? Well. I knew I was in trouble. So does this collection hurt? OH YEAH. And we're all in deep trouble now. The first story in the collection is Eric LaRocca's best work so far. It is called This Skin Was Once Mine, which is also the title of the book. It's the feature presentation, the main event and it deserves that status. Because it is a gorgeous monstrosity. The writing is polished and the pacing and plotting are pitch-perfect. LaRocca's always been extremely talented at developing and unravelling characters quickly and effectively, but this is something on a totally different level. The story deals with a young woman estranged from her parents finally returning home after her father passes away. She comes back to a place brimming with strange memories. It seems her childhood house has gotten bigger, instead of smaller. Not just physically, but emotionally, mentally. Like Shirley Jackson with Hill House and Dario Argento with Suspiria, the setting and the mood become characters. Even the furniture in this story takes on a life of its own. All of this builds to a shocking revelation where the story evolves from a Gothic horror full of guilt and paranoia and family politics to a surreal character-driven nightmare. The narrator finds something hidden in the house and the plot opens up like a flower. It blooms. It blossoms. Like one of those intricate pop-up books. Where pictures unfold into a far more elaborate design. What was once flat, now springs up, it has more dimensions. I compare this work to Dario Argento because that's what it reminded me of the most. Argento's elegant philosophy of horror. The visuals LaRocca strives to create with his prose are a deliberate aesthetic choice. Every sequence brims with a sort of poetic evil. The hidden spaces, the animal symbology, the gorgeous descriptions and turns of dream logic and broken flowery prose. It gives an unnatural glamour to content that is ruthlessly obscene. Which is actually more horrible than if it was simply presented straight. There is an intent under the flesh that is more grotesque than the surface level atrocity. There is a seduction to it. The narrative wants you to take part in it, the story dares you to feel complicit. To empathise with the horrors. One particular line where the narrator admits they are jealous is like a sliver of ice being shoved through the heart. The plot moves wonderfully between what the narrator tells you and shows you and what is truly happening. So the characters exist in many more dimensions than just one and the plot weaves between those dimensions. So underneath the glamours and the soft-focus blur of surreal dreams are the long and rusted chains of abuse. We see how abuse grows like vines between people. How it is passed down family lines like a terrible responsibility, an heirloom, a corruption infecting everything around it. Evil creating mirrors of itself. Using guilt and shame and love, spreading itself across a family like butter on bread. I give this one a 10/10. The second story SEEDLING combines the internet's favourite past-time hypochondria with Lovecraftian horror and a broken family dynamic. Where another child learns about her parent dying and travels to console her grieving father. And like all people suddenly confronted with their mortality, the protagonist begins to feel that creeping paranoia of disease. Where we obsess over wounds that don't look right, moles that are strange shapes, marks, ageing and all the colours of the body that are so terribly mutant and toxic as we age. When we begin to realise the urgency of our life we become involved in a sort of murder mystery. Only the killer is our own flesh, planning to betray us and secretly hatching plots against us. But with Eric LaRocca, it is never simply enough to have an unhealthy obsession, so as the protagonist investigates the mysteries of a strange new wound, she finds to her wonder that the mystery begins to reach back. The mutant body communicates as tendrils spool out of black tumorous gaps to wrap probing fingers. And soon we learn that the seeds of this particular corruption might have been planted long ago. A flower of neglect and rejection, slowly blossoming into new connections, not through life, but through death. The sheer audacity of this work and how it effortlessly shifts from dream logic to cosmic horror to a sort of Eraserhead style psychodrama is wondrous to behold. 8/10 The third story All The Parts of You That Won't Easily Burn is quite the deformed nightmare. It isn't as strong as the first tale, but it stuck with me the most after reading it. And you know you're in trouble because Eric's broken out one of his trademark titles. I mean, you're always in trouble with Eric LaRocca's writing, you're never quite safe, but when he rolls out those Giallo "My Deviance Is a Broken Promise Locked in Your Fruit Cellar" titles, it's his way of slowly snapping on the rubber gloves. Things are gonna get upsetting. And dirty. And wet. In many ways more than just one. What begins as a man paying a very peculiar price in exchange for an expensive ornate knife turns into well... I would describe it in a blur as Robert Shearman's Thumbsucker meets Miike's Audition meets Castle Freak. Where kink is attracted to kink, consent is pushed to a breaking point and where weird desires involving cutting and glass attract something altogether entirely more grotesque. This story creates a horrible web of escalation that culminates in one of the best dinner parties in the history of horror fiction. As Titus Andronicus pointed out, there's a party and then there's a Centaur's Feast. 9/10 The final story PRICKLE is the most simple and straight-forward of the fiction here, but it is also one of the cruellest. It involves two elderly gentlemen, who are not as gentle as they first seem, who enjoy a good light-hearted game of ruining other people's afternoons. They call it Prickle. This is a story that you expect to build to an escalation that instead develops so quickly and effectively in the final third that the big pay-off is both something you see coming and something you can never predict. I won't spoil it, but my jaw was hanging open and my stomach was in knots. 8/10 This particular piece of disgusting debauchery completes the collection but it also continues the first story's line of themes involving evil creating cultures of complicity and the erasure of boundaries. Through ritual, through shared trauma, shared kinks, shared neglect and misunderstanding and through playful, childish glee and friendship. Remember kids, it's all fun and games until somebody loses an eye. And even when that happens, for some people, it's still all fun and games. In fact, for some, it becomes even more entertaining. Be careful out there. Overall I give this quaint collection of cruel cuties a nifty 9/10. ...more |
Notes are private!
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Feb 20, 2024
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Mar 14, 2024
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Feb 20, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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0141186178
| 9780141186177
| 0141186178
| 3.95
| 2,516
| 1970
| Mar 01, 2001
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it was amazing
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There's evil. There's Satanic. And then at the very last level of Dante's Inferno, beneath chains of ice and frozen tombs of fallen angels, there sits I There's evil. There's Satanic. And then at the very last level of Dante's Inferno, beneath chains of ice and frozen tombs of fallen angels, there sits Iris Murdoch. Under a blanket, getting cozy by an open fireplace, having tea and eating cake. Iris is a diabolical trickster, a goddess of strife. Iris is also one of the most important writers of our modern era. One of the most talented. Her skill at plotting is Shakespearean, her craft at philosophical debate is unmatched in fiction. Even with Camus? Kafka? And Cormac McCarthy? Oh yes. Murdoch also develops and writes better characters than the majority of her peers. And she's absolutely full of poison. She is an existential threat to your worldview. No matter what that worldview may be. The more I return to Jackson's Dilemma, The Sea the Sea, The Black Prince and Message to the Planet the more the philosophy in those books starts to make Conspiracy Against the Human Race look like My Little Pony. On one hand you see a nihilist say 'life is cruel and inflicting it on others is a moral evil', and here is Murdoch clicking her tongue like a devil and replying 'actually moral evil is beloved by all and that is why life is cruel.' Oh dear. No matter who wins the debate, everybody loses. In a Fairly Honorable Defeat, Murdoch has a villain sit in a scene and nearly break the fourth wall to pieces, espousing that 'actually we hate goodness and love evil'. And then she proves it to you, the reader, while having the same villain butcher relationships and destroy lives and giggle about it over the telephone like some filthy Puck. Now that, my darlings, is a trick. It is one thing to turn a man into a cockroach, it is another thing entirely to turn a man into a cockroach and make your audience love the insect. That's a sadistic game. Of course the character is a representation, it is not real, but by drawing attention to its own artificiality and asking you to accept its behaviour as wrong, while writing it to be so entertaining that you know you cannot help but admire them? That's a painful little play. Iris' work here is much like the Treachery of Images, in that it is telling you 'this is not a pipe' while drawing attention to the pipe. Where you can notice nothing else but the bloody pipe. Creating a paradox of bias. And it is an artful destruction of our morals. Like Aaron in Titus Andronicus making a confession that should bring down the wrath of the gods themselves. And by doing so, and not being immediately struck by a lightning bolt, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Gods are not listening. If they exist at all. Murdoch plays the game like a boxer who tells you exactly where they are going to hit you and how. And that you will be unable to do anything to stop it. Because you can do nothing. And then she proceeds to beat you with ease and precision. Exactly how she predicted. To the point that you would think fate itself moved through her hands. A Fairly Honorable Defeat is a diabolical book. It is Mephistophelian. It makes Machiavelli look like a kitten. The Satanic Bible is a hysterical wet-fart compared to this elaborate nest of razor-wire. The book centres around an antagonist Julius who makes a game of destroying lives. The villain is revealed to be so deliberately cruel and horrendous that he's almost inspiring. His abandonment of all rules of social conduct and civilisation making him innately anti-authority in a way that the Joker could only dream of being. At first the game seems like a comedy. Arrogant moralists and overblown hedonists thrown into a tizzy by hilarious deceptions and clashing in the night, bumbling around each other like confused lovers. It's so classic Shakespeare, the bard's fingerprints are all over it. Until Iris Murdoch does the unthinkable and shows you the real-world consequences of these kinds of social games. So many steps of Julius' character are set up in advance to reveal his true nature in the final chapters of the book. His stuttering, which makes him come off as an underdog, hides the depths of his primal cunning and manipulation. His own lies and deceit are held in contrast to other characters attempting to lie to spare loved ones from cruel truths. And Julius scolds such behaviour, showing it is not honesty or deceit that he values, but cruelty. He is portrayed as a truth-teller, honest to a fault of being daring, but this is itself Julius' greatest lie. His 'brutal honesty' is simply a mask for glib viciousness. His destroying of people's clothes and destroying their hearts and trust on a whim are not the actions of a person unburdened by social codes, as they are impulsive deeds of childish glee. Sickening. Stupid. Ill-minded. And then Murdoch pulls back and shows you the bigger picture in the final moments. Shows you exactly where and how Julius learned his little tricks. It's a reveal that hits you like a cold wind. The weight of it landing on you like a hundred years. It makes you want to defend him, even when you know you cannot. It is unmitigated cruelty. The very nature of his character is a play on the reader's own morality. The simplistic laws of black and white. Good and evil. Just and unjust. Absolutes torn to shreds. To accept the unspoken justification for his deeds is to accept his worldview. Which allows you to be manipulated by him. Like his stutter, he uses sympathy as a weapon. This sets him against most villains. Most fiction dealing with evil and death and harm are actually very straight-forward in their morality. The Judge in Blood Meridian, Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men, Lester Ballard in Child of God are all magnetic, but ultimately uncomplicated. For all the outrage and the clutching of pearls around horror, the vast, vast majority of horror fiction lands on the side of the righteous. Good may not always conquer evil in such stories, but evil is openly, obviously, evil. Easy to point out in a line-up. One will never mistake Freddy, Pennywise or Slenderman for your average Joe. They are mutants. Freaks. Twisted on the outside as on the inside. Even iconic villains like Hannibal Lecter are pretty straight-forward. They challenge us not because their actions are complicated, but their nature is. They are not intriguing or frightening because of their lack of morals, but because of their seductive charisma. It is easy to say 'serial killers are bad', it is quite another thing to say 'serial killers can be charming'. That's the actual scary part. That something dangerous can be charming. But here Iris Murdoch goes much, much, further. She dissects our steadfast desire for moral absolutes. Opens them up like rotting fruit. Reveals the sick and easy and almost pathetically fragile hypocrisy in our sense of justice. How our lust for drama and gossip and rumour-mongering corrupts our civilised codes, our kindness, our humanity. She makes evil engaging, easy to underestimate, easy to dismiss, cavalier and breezy. Simple to be swept up in. Evil waltzes through our rules and our lives, cutting us to pieces in a dance that is equally whimsical and devastating. Not what we like to think evil is, but what it really is. Childish. Free. Unburdened. How we envy it. How we desire it. How evil people use our own lust for evil against us. Making us complicit in their schemes and then driving us collectively off a cliff. And leaving us to burn in the wreckage. This is one of the funniest and most disturbing books I've ever read. It's like if Jack Ketchum wrote Much Ado About Nothing. Iris Murdoch puts a blade to your genitals and opens you from crotch to gullet. With a smile in her step and blowing a kiss to your still warm and trembling lips. She's an absolute spider. We love it though. Just like she knew we would. 10/10 ...more |
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Feb 11, 2024
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Apr 03, 2024
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Feb 11, 2024
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0156031876
| 9780156031875
| 0156031876
| 3.80
| 10,124
| Jul 01, 2005
| Sep 05, 2006
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it was amazing
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So. Kelly Link is a brilliant author of magical realism. I kind of hate that term. Magical realism. Because it's redundant. Magic (if you're doing it So. Kelly Link is a brilliant author of magical realism. I kind of hate that term. Magical realism. Because it's redundant. Magic (if you're doing it right) always feels real. Nothing feels more real than magic. I'll get around to that later. In the mean time: Kelly Link's stories blur the line between surreal experimental narratives and fairy tales and try to capture (and mostly succeed) that child-like sense of wonder and danger inherent in not really grasping the world around you. That feeling of living in a world that is so much bigger than you, where everything feels like it can be real. Being a kid and knowing there are rules, and that you must follow them, but not really being aware of the depth and complexity of the game. So everything feels like a spider-web. Traps woven into traps woven into traps and dangled all around you in a glistening collage of threat, beauty and wonder. This book is a collection of short stories that are real modern day fairy tales. Not the Disney kind where we get tons of (sometimes extremely dark) cultural folklore processed into happily ever after baby pablum. But stories that are about living in the world told from the perspective of younger people growing into it. Stories that capture the feeling of adventure and also apprehension, confusion and the dizzying overwhelming sensory overload of sweet foods, first kisses, great hugs and family struggles. For me this book was a very fast read. I finished it in a single sitting. It was recommended by Laird Barron, so I was hoping to get something exceptionally strange. And I did. But not because of technique or style or prose. And not because of its narrative choices to subvert popular fictional trends. The real sense of weirdness in this book is not in the shopping zombies or fairy cultures living in old hand-bags, it's in the characters. It is deeply seated in their every day experience living with these things. As I've pointed out before, strange is an underrated part of fiction. Because the feeling of something being 'weird' is one of the most difficult things to genuinely capture and one of the feelings that most defines our life. This is what I mean when say nothing is more real than magic. We love a lot of scientific thinking (for the exact same reason we love religion) because we love the world to make sense, and there is a demand for that. Because for 99% of (at least my) life, nothing makes sense. There is always a demand for order, because the world is chaos. But a lot of times both religion and science fail to give you that sense of objective reality. And their failures in doing so, create a higher sense of weirdness and dissociation. For example: the idea that I'm a collection of nerves and electric signals that has convinced itself it is alive, made up of the debris of exploded stars going back billions of years to the birth of the universe. This, I have been told, is a very rational explanation for my current state of being. I am just a living thing of lightning and dead stars and chaotic patterns that got so complex they developed self-awareness and tricked themselves into a sense of meaning! No big deal! HEY-YO! That's our sensible, rational understanding of the world. And that sound you hear in the background is the gentle twitching of my good eye. The more I have come to know the less I understand. The thing is, because we are so inundated in this weird experience sometimes the weird in fiction and art can feel almost...too choreographed. Where we are told "expect the unexpected" but we are given exactly what we expected. Which I guess is unexpected in this case? But. No. When you are told something is absurd and it is absurd, it becomes less absurd. It becomes predictable. It becomes formulaic. I see this all the time in modern and contemporary art. All the concepts of abandoning form, deconstructing style, abandoning style, abandoning structure, incorporating other cultures, challenging norms, challenging hierarchy, challenging meaning? None of that is new, or particularly done better in the current styles. And I love abstract and contemporary art. But when you call attention to abandoning a form I think the message you send isn't 'abstract'. It's that the form holds a lot of meaning to you. That the form is everything to you. By drawing attention to not having it, you draw attention to the want of it. Not necessarily from your audience, but from you, the artist. I think a great realistic work can be more abstract and more surreal than 'surreal' or 'abstract' works. There can be something in a work like Albert Bierstadt's Storm in the Rocky Mountains that brings up emotions we can't define, that makes us approach the world around us in a way we can't express. And the same is true in narrative. Sometimes the most realistic thing, twisted just right, like a divorce, like a first kiss, like a funny Grandma who loves to cheat at Scrabble? That can create a sense of overall weirdness and strangeness that is a bigger and grander deconstruction than overt playing with formula. A child's loss of structure from their family and friendships and their favourite show ending (or dramatically changing) can express a larger sense of deconstruction of culture and identity as a whole. While drawing attention to subversion of classic plot/design is often just (I feel), a superficial challenge that is easy to accept and discard. I think a lot of the value of 'realism' in art comes from struggling with the abstract and very, very strange nature of our life and experiences. Anyways, this review has gotten completely away from me. It has grown legs like Baba Yaga's house and marched into the forest to lay an egg. Goodnight review! Speed you to your nest. But that, in a sense, is always the biggest compliment I can give to a writer. They capture me in their mood. They confuse me. They get me blabbing and babbling. For people like me, head-vomit is essentially the same as a warm hug by a fireplace. A snuggle under a blanket. Good books get me thinking and grinding my gears. I can always tell when an author has written something interesting, because I'll feel provoked. Not necessarily challenged, but poked with a stick. Like. Shoved. And made to come out of my filthy den to think for a moment. So here I am... all thinking. All bottled up lightning and dying stars and searching for patterns. AND I BLAME KELLY LINK. Insufferable, nasty, full of sticks! And cats! Frustrating. Cruel. Cutesy. Pretentious! Nostalgic. And provocative. I like that. 9/10 ...more |
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Apr 26, 2024
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Paperback
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1632157098
| 9781632157096
| 1632157098
| 3.96
| 65,698
| Jul 13, 2016
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it was amazing
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Jul 13, 2023
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B01DJOS93I
| 3.96
| 65,698
| Jul 13, 2016
| Jul 13, 2016
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it was amazing
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Kindle Edition
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0061092002
| 9780061092008
| 0061092002
| 3.80
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it was amazing
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The thing about Clive Barker, is that not only is he one of the best horror writers of all time, he's absolutely one of the best fantasy writers of al
The thing about Clive Barker, is that not only is he one of the best horror writers of all time, he's absolutely one of the best fantasy writers of all time. Wait, I forgot. This is my review. I get to say what I want. The New York Times can't hurt me anymore. Okay. Clive Barker's the best fantasy writer of the last 40 years. EAT IT, NEW YORK TIMES. If we went to an alternate reality where Clive Barker never existed and you took any modern fantasy writer and they produced Weaveworld, Imajica, Thief of Always, Great and Secret Show, Everville, Galilee, Sacrament, Cabal and the Abarat series? They would be hailed as a mad genius. Not just good or even great, but a truly, deeply, mad genius. Youtube and Tiktok would be full of never-ending praise for them. Weaveworld and Imajica don't have sequels and don't need them and are both so far ahead of the curve that writers like Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore are still struggling to catch up to them 40 years later. And FYI: They never will. Never. And it's not because those writers aren't extremely talented. Alan Moore's monstrous Jerusalem is a deeply impressive fantasy work trying to describe his place in the world. It is very much following in the footsteps of Barker. It's a personal work that spans dimensions and time and tumbles with Gods and Demons and sexuality and culture and politics. And it's over a thousand pages long. It demands serious commitment from the reader (and the critic). But it feels tiny compared to Imajica. Thin. Gossamer. Both in scope and in empathy. There are fantasy series that span dozens of books and sometimes even multiple different worlds that feel tiny compared to what Clive Barker regularly writes. Many fantasy authors are constantly reaching to describe and explain something that Barker expresses naturally. Instinctively. Most writers create fantasy like they're tourists. Where every landmark fills the audience with awe, and every tree is "the biggest and most beautiful tree you've ever seen". Clive Barker writes fantasy like a person who lives in that world (because I believe he does). He takes the reader to the hidden spots where the tourists never go. He lets you soak in the character and the ambience of a place. The wonder and awe isn't from scale but from how relatable the utterly strange can feel when it's seen from the right perspective. How a different world can feel like home in a heartbeat. Like something you forgot, but never left. That's what Barker's fantasy feels like. Barker's monsters and myth seem completely natural. His gods and goddesses and spirits and creatures are at once like us, but also alien. Like wild animals. Things of a different nature, but they still have a sense of nature to them. They still belong to a world and are entangled in its laws (both spoken and not), even if we don't understand that world. We see them orbiting it. Expressing it. This kind of writing reflects the ancient gods of actual mythology. The Greek legends (which are often compared to superheroes) were not simply about 'humans' with powers. Their gods embodied forces of nature and the world. Those forces were woven into those gods actions and identity and stories. The gods entire myth became an expression of the laws they embodied. Their stories became both literal and metaphor. Take for example: Ares as the God of bloody conflict and war. He was not an unstoppable warrior as he is often portrayed in modern media (which is kinda ironic if you think about how deceptive our culture is about war, we are telling the truth even when we are lying). Ares was vain and childish, seeking victory and constantly finding embarrassment. Every conquest from the physical to the sexual met with humiliation and defeat. He was crushed at Troy by Athena, beaten by mortals, scolded by Zeus and Hera, captured sleeping with his own sister by Hephaestus and put on display for the other gods like a trophy. Because war is vanity. War is impulsive. Often crushed by wisdom, authority and maturity. Its greatest victories becoming nothing but a hollow trophy to be laughed at. Its unbridled ego often racing into its own hubris. Promising its soldiers glory, power and immortality but often delivering nothing but poverty, sadness and crippling humiliation. That is the nature of bloody conflict, that is the nature of combat and that is the nature of war. And so the god of war embodies the nature of war. The same is true with Clive Barker's gods, goddesses, angels, spirits and entities. They embody the nature of their own worlds. From the Cenobites offering enlightenment through self-destruction to Imajica's broken god Hapexamendios to Weaveworld's lonely burning Scourge and the ravaged sorceress Immacolata the Incantatrix. And with this novel we have the wandering immortal storyteller Galilee. Themselves a story that belongs to many and nobody all at once. Like all stories, really. Galilee is like the waves he rides to escape his own history. He is fluid. Dark and deep, giving and taking. He is a trickster, entertainer and artist, both heartbroken and yearning for love. Romancing and loving women and men and making them feel whole, only to depart suddenly, like the end of a story, creating a sense of loss and a hunger for more. Galilee is a book about two families. One searching for power. The other power incarnate. And how those who search for power and have power are often the weakest and most vulnerable of all. It is a sprawling, spinning narrative, swimming in barely seen myths and stories built upon stories. Fae and Faustian pacts. Business deals and occult power. It is a tale bringing together many tangential elements and influences into a strange mixture of crumbling dynasties and hidden centuries. It is about gods and humans. It is about American royalty and celebrities, and the broken facades of modern fairy-tale Disney romances. Where wealthy princes and girls from humble beginnings find love only to uncover that happily ever-after comes with a terrible price. And it is a story of a secret kept between rich and powerful women. A place where they meet a strange fae lover, brought in on the seas, to heal and entrance and tell them stories. To restore them. A lover that has acted as a bridge between a world of cut-throat politics and a family of entities that no amount of political and economic hubris dare to challenge. A tale of two families that have orbited each other for decades and are finally colliding with a cataclysmic storm of passion, delusion and savage jealousy. This book is one of my all-time favourite novels. And I rarely recommend it to friends. Partly because I want to hoard it. I think. Also because I find it difficult. It's one of the few novels I think is actually challenging. There are many novels I've been told are 'difficult reads' that I found easy, almost simplistic. The majority of what's called 'difficult' in literature is just novels that have flowery prose or different grammar, different styles of narrative, tangential storytelling or are simply puns stacked onto puns to the point where they become an impenetrable language of in-jokes. But I've never found such things hard to read. Galilee is a gorgeously written prose, that is doing something altogether different than just playing with narrative tricks, cultural asides and in-jokes. Barker's devising a vocabulary of the fantastic. He's completely building a new kind of fantasy, or resurrecting one that's very, very old. Or both at the same time. He's layering ancient myth on top of other ancient myths and then weaving them into the folklore of American celebrity culture and history. This book is a bit Tuatha Dé Danann, and it is a bit Kennedy dynasty. And there's Arthurian mythos. A little Morgan. A little Mordred. A little Marilyn Monroe. Bringing these mythologies together is like Godzilla fighting Cthulhu. You could argue they're nearly identical creatures from a certain point of view. But trying to bring them together creates a sort of tonal dissonance that shouldn't work. But here, it does. Suddenly and beautifully Barker rings the bells and brings the myths together. And they fit, like they were always meant to fit. The two mythologies fuck. They intermingle, they join together, both literally and metaphorically. This is a story of the writing of a story, about a being who is a story, who exists as link between two worlds of stories. It has a bizarre elemental potency. And the nature of it makes my head feel like it's gonna implode. Like the pressure of coming up too quickly from out of deep water. It reminds me the most of Murakami and Ishiguro at their best. It's a story for people who are ready for something that's so well designed it appears random. Or is so random, it appears well designed. When I sat down to write this review, I kept having to re-write it, because no matter what I was saying, it was too small to tackle the larger subject matter. This is a book that demands an exhaustive discussion. Not necessarily an analysis. I'm not trying to get to Clive's secret heart and expose it. I would need a knife and a decent bone hammer for that. But I'm trying to wrestle with the book. I'm trying to pin it down. And it's like trying to hold water in your arms. It can't be done alone. It needs another body. It cannot be just one disabled fart sitting in a chair and talking to the void. A blank screen makes for a terrible conversationalist (sometimes). But that inability to truly wrestle with the entirety of this book does not make me love it less, if anything it makes me love it more. Because a great story is never truly finished with the reader. In fact the best stories don't always have to end. And our love affairs with those stories can continue as long as our passion burns and we remember their name. And so we pass great stories to others. Like a trusted confidant. Like a secret lover. And with each new reader, the story grows and a new passion is kindled and that fire lights the way for another. 10/10 ...more |
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Feb 05, 2024
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May 22, 2024
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Jul 05, 2023
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Mass Market Paperback
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0802140181
| 9780802140180
| 0802140181
| 3.46
| 96,978
| Jul 1959
| Jan 26, 2004
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it was amazing
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Naked Lunch is the most realistic novel ever written. It's true realism. Not the realism of our fantasies where we imagine everything happening for a
Naked Lunch is the most realistic novel ever written. It's true realism. Not the realism of our fantasies where we imagine everything happening for a reason, where motives make sense and where actions lead to completely logical conclusions. No. That shit never actually happens in the real world. Naked Lunch is exactly what it describes: the naked reality of what we consume. Where overly strange people become colourful mandrills and take a dump on bureaucrats, where sexual obsession leads to redefining everything as sexuality, where fart jokes become sentient and devour our brains, where everything is screwed and consequently wants to screw us. Where surgery is the new art and where David Cronenberg gets all his ideas. This book is actual reality. And it has inspired more of our world than you can even measure. David Cronenberg adapted Naked Lunch into a movie, but every movie since Naked Lunch is really an adaptation of Naked Lunch. Especially all of Cronenberg's films. But all films, really. Film itself as a medium is now just an adaptation of Naked Lunch. Just another hit. Just another fix. If you smell what the rock is cooking? "This isn't realistic" enough we exclaim while pointing at the shoulders of the giant upon which we stand. We are not separate from Naked Lunch. We never were. Even before it was written, it was always waiting to be written. It is our roach motel. We are stuck in it. Like that attractive weightlifter in that Freddy Krueger movie. Although I preferred Toy Newkirk. Also contrary to what you've heard a million times by now, Naked Lunch is not incoherent. It is perhaps the most coherent novel ever written by a human being. Of course we do not count the novels written by the bugs. They are a different species and their perception of identity developed in a different evolutionary circumstance. Who can forget that seminal insect rebuttal to War and Peace: War and War and War and War and More War and Even More War and God I love War, and Don't Stop the Wars Please I Need the Wars by that noted fire ant queen Henry Kissinger. I would say Naked Lunch's coherence is absolute. It is a thick coherence. A membrane of coherence, a physical oozing growth that has developed over the head of the novel. A literature birth caul. You have to peel it back to play with its sensitive glands. Otherwise the book won't respond to you. It will go limp and sad and soft. The book must be hard and bulbous and full of thick throbbing veins, like Joe Rogan's head. That's the only way to get that most out of it. Do you get what I'm saying? Me neither. It's bigger than me. It's bigger than us. It's too large, too serpentine, it's got too many legs. I can't count all those legs. But it sure can dance. That wonderful, all-consuming, gay junkie centipede we call art. We love it so! Even when it gets all that stuff in our hair. Comes with the territory! Right? But it's good for the skin. Or so I'm told. I heard that once from a woman who slept with me. How could she possibly be wrong? And that is the problem. Isn't it? The coherence of Naked Lunch is so threatening. SO COHERENT. It makes us feel inadequate. Because most people (myself included) are so incredibly incoherent. We simply assume we make sense, when in reality, we're raving, frothing, dribbling, lunatics. So many people define the world (and most of fiction) through a vague interpretation of Platonic realism. Where everything we accept in the world is a universal truth. And anything that challenges what we accept is heresy. We mistake traditionalism for reality. Isn't that cute? Which is the very height of delusional madness. If you can be honest with yourself. Which is impossible to do FYI, because nobody ever really is honest with themselves. To assume you are is to admit you value your own bias. Which means you can't know when you're lying. Which suggests that you are inherently dishonest. It's a catch-22. Understand? NO. You don't. But I don't blame you. I don't understand me either. How can I expect to connect with others when I can't even connect with myself? It's no wonder so many people online value pornography. It's the only time they're ever really in touch with themselves. Y'know? Isolation from others is hard enough. Isolation from yourself? Oh baby. That's the rub. Literally! WHAT? I'm supposed to be doing a review? No I'm not. This is a think piece. It's thinking about being a piece of you. Maybe it already is. Maybe it always was. In that way every work is a part of Naked Lunch. It never ends. And never shall end. That's the nature of art and reality. Which is why this book is so coherent. Which is also why this book has been the target of censorship for so many years. Denial of reality is what humans do best. It is our raison d'être. We deny lust, we deny hunger, we deny pain, we deny jealousy, we even deny death. And nobody denies reality quite as much as a censor. They are wonderfully strange cretins. Hilarious creatures wrapping their heads in cellophane and pretending it makes them invulnerable to bad ideas. Stumbling around like those nurses in Silent Hill. NO SUDDEN MOVEMENTS. Everybody knows only the tin foil can protect you from Tom Cruise's thought signals. Censors believe we are infected by the bad ideas. Like a tick bite. But somehow they can be exposed to those very same tick bites and remain JUST FINE. They get those bites all over their bodies and heads. They're covered in them from foot to scalp. And they're JUST FINE. They are like people who claim that they are the sensible middle ground in politics and that everybody to the right or left of them is a crazed extremist. Of course, of course. "Everybody who disagrees with me is a madman" is something only a very sane and stable and self-aware person would say. Why it's the height of sanity and rationalism to see oneself as an inherently rational middle ground. No delusion happening there, kids. No sir. That person is standing on solid earth and hasn't obviously walked off a cliff and is about to plummet to their doom like an oblivious Wile E. Coyote. That's all censors in a nutshell. Treading in the clouds on a platform of their own hot air and hubris. Every one of them is a "Nice Guy" until they hit those rocks. Which brings us back to Naked Lunch. You see? What I'm cooking? Our culture is all burnt spoons and addictions. We are constantly hallucinating. We are constantly diverting. Constantly needing our hit. Constantly grifting and conning ourselves more than anybody. Seeking out marks as we make ourselves into the ultimate mark. We are lusting for everything. We have been raised as junkies by junkies for the whims of junkies based on millions of years of addiction. We are all one podcast away from wearing the same t-shirt every day for six months and becoming a nest for pill bugs. "You're next! YOU'RE NEXT." I scream into the void. And the void calls the police and serves me a restraining order. Typical. Anyways 10/10. Beware. This book is the actual Necronomicon. Written in blood. Printed on flesh. A gate for the old ones. And the new. A "How to Manual" for everybody! From body horror enthusiasts to stark-raving conspiracy theorists, counter culture revolutionaries, porn-empowered Decepticons and every other hive for brain worms on the planet. They all speak its tongue. Eternally. And forever. They have no language outside of it. All of the internet speaks fluent Naked Lunch and most have never even read it. They are simply its leaf-cut clones. Little Audrey 2s and 3s and 4s. Little Mean Green Mothers from Outer Space. Naked Lunch is their singular voice. Even if they don't know it. They all sing its song and continue its story. And always shall continue it, until the end of all sentience in the universe. And the bugs take over. We're all here together, forever. Caught in our sticky, sparkling Roach Motel. Long live the new flesh. ...more |
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Jun 30, 2023
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Jul 09, 2023
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Jun 30, 2023
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Paperback
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0142000655
| 9780142000656
| 0142000655
| 4.43
| 603,533
| 1952
| 2002
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 23, 2023
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Jul 05, 2023
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Jun 23, 2023
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Paperback
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1501100076
| 9781501100079
| 1501100076
| 4.07
| 179,745
| Jun 02, 2015
| Jun 02, 2015
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it was amazing
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Easily one of the best novels King has ever written. Incredible book. |
Notes are private!
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Jun 09, 2023
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Jun 14, 2023
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Jun 09, 2023
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Hardcover
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0743273567
| 9780743273565
| 0743273567
| 3.93
| 5,738,199
| Apr 10, 1925
| 1925
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it was amazing
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Fitzgerald is an author who's personal style always feels flat to me. In many of his other books and short fiction he sounds like he's summarising his Fitzgerald is an author who's personal style always feels flat to me. In many of his other books and short fiction he sounds like he's summarising his story more than telling it. But this is The Great Gatsby. The iconic work. The great American novel. Surely it must thaw my terrifying aura of winter ice. Surely its dissection of the American Dream and of how classism and materialism is wrapped around these broken hearts and broken egos, must penetrate my steel wall of cynicism? It must plunge through my defences and into the hidden gardens of my juicy empathy berry fields. Right? Well, yeah. It does. Look? Off it goes. In the fields of the empathy berries. Huzzah. The Great Gatsby is absolutely great. The best novel of all time? No. The best American novel of all time? Nah. The best novel of this type of cultural criticism? Sorry but Iris Murdoch has that championship belt and I'm not seeing anybody wrestling it off her anytime soon. But great? Yes. It is truly great. Its got this unforgettable sense of melancholy running through every single chapter. It's an easy book to read and it goes fast but it stays with you and expands inside your head when it's done. I say that about a lot of great fiction and film, because that's what great fiction does, that's what great art does, it gets bigger inside you. It plants seeds and grows and in some cases it never stops growing. There are books that will not only stay with you for the rest of your life, they will develop inside of you. And develop through you. And Gatsby is gigantic. It is the haunted mansion that never stops building new wings. And it's also very small. Very sad. A man chasing a romantic dream, pushing himself up the social ladder, clawing tooth and nail for that ideal. And for what? To what quiet, lonely, end? I think a lot of us know a Gatsby or fear we are a Gatsby. The finale of this books is one of the most effective I've ever read. It's an emotionally gutting finish in the same conversation as the peak of Shakespeare and Melville and Steinbeck. I brought up Murdoch previously. Her work The Sea, The Sea always feels like a companion piece to Gatsby. Like they mirror each other. Gatsby and Charles Arrowby are a perfect reflection of each other. In many ways both protagonists are the same, desiring the same dream, lifted by the same will and haunted by the shallowness of their ambitions. They are both hobbled by their delusion, their romantic vision of themselves and what they want their lives to mean. The fact is that they are chasing dreams and not realities. And many people around them are willing to enable that. To get high on it like paint fumes, to feed on it. Vampires. Of a sort. But when those dreams come crashing down (and they always do), who will be left? Who will be with them in the wreckage of their ambition? In some ways I think the ending for Gatsby is more empathetic than Murdoch's novel. My heart aches for the man because he has done so much to have nothing. But in many ways I feel Murdoch's ending was more empathetic because it was more honest. It is one thing to see the desire for childhood romance through the prism of fame as delusion. It is another thing entirely to see the entitlement of that dream. The poison at the heart of that desire. And how it kills and maims. It's always interesting to return to this book after not reading it for a few years. To watch how it grows and changes and develops. In my mind this story is like a great massive mansion on the rocks. A place where people once celebrated and had lavish parties. A massive house framed by the crashing waves that slowly eat at the foundation it was built on. But what was once full of life now stands as empty as a broken promise. There are no ghosts here. Nothing walking the hallways at night. What haunts this place is what never was, what dances in the ballroom in the dark, is despair. ...more |
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Jun 08, 2023
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Jun 18, 2023
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Jun 08, 2023
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Paperback
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1250854113
| 9781250854117
| 1250854113
| 4.34
| 52,202
| Sep 13, 2022
| Sep 13, 2022
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it was amazing
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Goodness gracious. I didn't finish this book, I escaped it. I think if I stayed in those pages any longer I would have forgotten to breathe. Since this Goodness gracious. I didn't finish this book, I escaped it. I think if I stayed in those pages any longer I would have forgotten to breathe. Since this is the latest edition to the Locked Tomb books? I expected necromancy in space. I expected death-defying feats of bone-cutting vulgarity. I expected porn mags. I was not expecting the story to combine Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Jodorowsky's Metabarons, Cuarón's Children of Men and a Lovecraftian Anne of Green Gables with just a dash of 2001 for flavouring. But it was delicious. The subtle crunch in the final sentence: savoury. The delicate use of characterisation and dream logic: spellbinding. That one of my new favourite characters is named Hot Sauce: scintillating. 9.5/10 Seriously, Tamsyn Muir is so talented with dialog it should be illegal. Her prose has infected my brain. I will be talking like a supercilious, world-conquering, Downton Abbey necromancer for a week. ...more |
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Dec 15, 2023
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Jan 10, 2024
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Apr 15, 2023
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Hardcover
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1472115074
| 9781472115072
| 1472115074
| 3.45
| 16,848
| Apr 10, 2018
| Oct 04, 2018
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it was amazing
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This book absolutely has coke for brains. Not just any kind of cocaine. We're not talking Transformers the animated movie or Flash Gordon here. We're n This book absolutely has coke for brains. Not just any kind of cocaine. We're not talking Transformers the animated movie or Flash Gordon here. We're not even talking 80s, high-cut, Ski-Resort, pure Jefferson D'Arcy flowing mullet blow. We're talking 2001: The Space Cocaine. We're talking the cocaine mined from the underground forests in the depths of Jupiter's moons. We're talking the kind of cocaine that Emperor Freeza gets to motivate himself in the gym to come up with a new body transformation. He hits this magic Io pixie dust and his triceps suddenly get more deep vein thrombosis then the back of Joe Rogan's head. Space Opera is a rollicking roid-raging rhapsody of kinky alien Road Runners. It deals with the Metagalactic Grand Prix: a sort of Eurovision music contest in space. Complete with backstabbing, politics, nepotism, drugs, talking cats and making out with abstract concepts. The Grand Prix is an alien solution to "The Sentience War", the ongoing and constant debate in the galaxy over whether or not a species is 'sentient' or 'food'. So new races are regularly invited to compete on the Grand Prix and strut their musical stuff for points and prizes. If they manage to place in the Grand Prix a species is declared 'sentient' and there is much celebration (see: drugs, sex, pregnancy). If a species doesn't place, they are...food. At best. Talking food. Singing food. But food nonetheless. They are declared unworthy of continued evolution and either harvested or bombed into oblivion to allow another species (see: cats) a chance to ascend. And now it's the human race's turn to either sing for or become supper. And to this end the aliens have summoned Earth's most worthy and talented musicians as declared by the empire. But unfortunately Yoko Ono couldn't make it and the Insane Clown Posse had a horrible magnet accident. So we're stuck with a one-hit wonder act called Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes. And if they don't rock so hard they make the sentient wormholes sing a-long, our collective butts are cooked. Maybe literally. Definitely literally. OKAY. Space Opera is basically what would happen if you took The Last Starfighter, Scott Pilgrim, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Space Dandy and mixed them together in a blender. And then dropped liquid LSD into your eyes and walked around making out with the leather furniture at your local Leon's. So in other words: It's hot. Good fun. It's randy. It's sticky. It's Lahey. It's gonna touch you in all the weird places you aren't normally touched. Yeah, right there. Prepare for re-entry. The void is singing. I can see how this novel completely flummoxed some reviewers. Its plot screams "SQUIRREL!" every ten seconds and points at weird and crazy and hilarious tangents interrupting the main story. For a few paragraphs there's plot and the next thing you know you're hearing the history of sentient zombie alien viruses that consistently produce the best coffee in the universe. For some people that melts their brain like a vinyl disc sitting on a hot plate. For me, it's butterscotch. It's chocolate. It's eating Dairy Queen blizzards with Grandma. It's sitting by the fire with my cat. It's new new car smell. It's old book smell. It's home. Yes, that's right Catherynne M. Valente. I too, am something of a brain damaged lunatic with the logic of a sentient math puzzle. I see you from across the room and I raise my chilled Faygo in your direction. And I award this book 9/10. You get a full Space Juggalo secret handshake. May the cats sleep comfortably, cuz otherwise we'll all be screwed. Merry Christmas, Happy Pride, Don't ask an alien to share their feelings and stop huffing jet fuel. Unless you wanna learn ninjitsu from strange cosmic fetuses that float around your head. In which case, get down with the clown. P.S.: I just realised this is BOOK 1 of a series of novels and I'm so happy my blood has turned into a fucking rainbow. My heart is pumping light. I am neon and electric fire. LIGHT WILL SAVE US. Thank you. Blow me. Goodnight. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 16, 2023
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Mar 27, 2023
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Mar 16, 2023
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Hardcover
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1945373059
| 9781945373053
| 1945373059
| 3.97
| 1,056
| Oct 07, 2016
| Oct 07, 2016
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it was amazing
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In short: Experimental collection of weird tales that takes iconic genre fiction staples into strange and different horizons. We have inventive re-ima
In short: Experimental collection of weird tales that takes iconic genre fiction staples into strange and different horizons. We have inventive re-imaginings of monsters and old gods and devils chasing men for their souls, slashers, curses, body-snatchers, doppelgangers, Frankenstein, future dystopias as well as government conspiracies and secretive cults. Plus dogs. Lots of dogs. All brought together into a constellation of rot, wreckage and beautiful, cold, cosmic decay. 10/10 LONGER REVIEW: This book is about the mythology of canines that has been intertwined into the world of man since the very beginning of our species. And how that link to nature is a constant reminder of the best of us, and the worst. It's also about Lovecraftian horror. And John Carpenter's Halloween. And a little bit Sleepy Hollow? Kinda? Sorta? And maybe Eraserhead. And Eerie Indiana? Too much? Not enough? It's less like a short story collection and more like a Laird Barron Alaskan multiverse of madness. A ton of stories that are quick, punchy, interconnected and yet completely work as separate individual plots. But also work as a strange, swirling, science fiction, horror, 80s slasher on DMT, multi-narrative, fantasy, personal drama blend. Mmmmm. Toasty. And it's a thesis on genre writing. I'm getting in too deep. Do I like this? NO, SIR. I LOVE THIS. You say self-indulgent, I say pass the hot sauce. Cuz baby, I'm gonna indulge. You cannot take this from me. I will screech and cling to this book like a child with a Nintendo 64 in a Christmas internet meme. I've read this book four times and each time I read the stories in a different order and each time the whole thing both makes perfect sense and is completely unhinged. Like everything comes unhinged. Minds. Reality. Jaws. ME. The first time I read this book I noticed all the many linked ideas and plots and concepts and names. Not only within this book but with other Laird Barron stories I've read. I began making a list and drawing out a web of all the different mysteries and how they connect to each other and by the time I was finished my fourth read, my personal chronicle of Swift to Chase looked like a bulletin board that some conspiracy nutcase would use to explain the live-action Netflix adaptation of Cowboy Bebop. "You see, it was really all about the Rockefellers." I shall unlock your secrets Laird Barron. What Stephen King does with the Dark Tower and Lovecraft does with his Cthulhu Mythos, Laird Barron is doing, but in a Twin Peaks meets Fargo and invites over Outer Limits for tea and cookies, "Don't Talk to me or my Space Potatoes" kind of way. This book starts strange and then drives right over the border straight into Bonkers McChilli country. Where we go Bonkers and Chill. But not necessarily in that order. And we don't always chill out. Things just get really, really cold. Like blackness of space, cold. Spooky cold. Which is good, because nobody and I mean no writer on the face of the planet Earth can evoke the sheer desolation of rural winter like Laird Barron. He's an absolute master when it comes to developing lore and he's even better at crafting the sense, feel and just visual of a weather-beaten life. Where even when it's not freezing you can see the mark of winter everywhere. That constant sense of generational damage even (or especially) in the people. Everything's either been painted over or left to fall apart. It's a world made of broken bones that have been healed and broken and healed and broken again. Like Wolff's law it toughens, but it is built on trauma. A land and sense of self crafted in scar tissue. It is a place of seasonal fracturing. And maybe dimensional fracturing too? EH? Shut up, the edibles have not kicked in yet. You'll know when the edibles kick in. This is why Laird is so good at developing these types of stories. Because he doesn't just see a character, he sees the history in the character. And he sees the history in a place. Even if he only brings it up in a single sentence, that history reverberates through how the character thinks, how they move, how they react, how they talk, how they interact with the weird. Their experience is lived in and real and so it brings reality to even the most strange and abstract ideas. And the same goes for his locations. They don't just exist on the page, they are a prism that refracts the ideas of the story. The story moves through that medium and onto the page. It is not just multi-layered (Laird), if you will. It is cast, using that dimension like a shadow play. Yes, now the edibles have kicked in. So lets take a fast look at the stories that await you in SWIFT TO CHASE and how I'd rate them: The first frostbitten fable involves carnival folks hiring a survivor of a serial killer to help banish a terrifying curse. Winks and nods ensue. Both literally and structurally. Dead things with half a face meet their match in a Final Girl looking for a decent payoff, in Screaming Elk, MT 7/10 In our next blizzard of blood, we find a girl hitchhiking across country who encounters a monster that is targeting dogs for fun. And that monster just might be looking to escalate into hunting something bigger. Laird Barron reminds us that sometimes it's best to put the bad ones down while you still can in LD50 10/10 There's a lot more to come in this below zero body count: A party goes to hell when a little LSD is put in the punch bowl, we're taken back to the origins of our Final Girl and see her confrontation with a demon she can't seem to leave in the past. A woman caught in the first winds of the Termination Dust. 9/10 Up next in our interconnected abattoir: A young lady tries to get the perfect birthday present for dear old dad who's dying of cancer. A celebrity impersonator from hell comes to dinner with Andy Kaufman Creeping through the Trees. 10/10 Talk about a hard act to follow: in this frigid frightmare we have a search for a missing person through the forests of Alaska, which is connected to a strange adaptation of Dracula and a climatic meeting with things that suck so much more than just blood. It feels like a lost John Carpenter masterpiece in Laird Barron's Ardor. 10/10 From one iconic movie monster to another, a vengeful man on a hunting trip into the woods goes through some serious ch-ch-changes as neither death nor betrayal can avert a rampage when The Worms Crawl In. 8/10 Next up we return to the teens of Eagle Talon and a divergent account of what happened on the frightful night of the Final Girl, in this body-ripping bonanza where friends and French Savate meet (Little Miss) Queen of Darkness 7/10 And then we're shot into the far future as we view war, advancement, dystopia, family and generational bonds through the eyes of an atomic dog in Ears Prick Up 10/10 From one hound to another. A man on a blind date encounters some very unlucky omens before the lights go out in Black Dog. 8/10 Captured in the cycles of PTSD as we once again see a different perspective of a teenage party turned into a slaughterhouse. Strange memories, survivor's guilt, broken minds and a possible connection to The Croning awaits in Slave Arm 9/10 In our next tale of polar pandemonium a man who interrupts an ancient ritual on the unforgiving ice becomes the target of The Wild Hunt in my favourite story of this collection: Frontier Death Song 10/10 And the final story wraps everything together into a cryogenic collage of conspiracy, experimentation, invasion, sex, fun and dream logic in Tomahawk Park Survivors Raffle 9/10 This book is full of broken things. Broken bonds of trust, broken families, broken timelines, broken minds, broken relationships, old wounds both physical and emotional. It's also about the bonds and unspoken pact between man and nature. And it's also about vampires, porn stars, spies, human experiments, lesbian cheerleaders showing us their breasts and Planet X showering debris on us. Laird Barron's style of horror is like when you lift up a slab of rock looking for a key and you see tons of weird and strange insects that have been living underneath the rock. Only magnified to a million. Where we lift up chunks of reality and there's bugs underneath. And they notice us. And they roll towards us from the deep Stygian gaps. The secret creeping worlds of horror that live parallel and underneath our own. Coming to finally initiate us into the truth. Or... make us into dinner. Or worse: a pet. See? Full circle. Complete Ouroboros. Got right back to the whole thing being about dogs. That's why they pay me the big bucks on patreon. Watch and learn kids. Watch and learn. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 23, 2023
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Feb 06, 2023
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Jan 23, 2023
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
0140275363
| 9780140275360
| B00A2KEJ5A
| 3.92
| 495,257
| -800
| Apr 29, 1999
|
it was amazing
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Like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is very possible to know this entire story off by heart and have never read it. As I've said before in a pre Like Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, it is very possible to know this entire story off by heart and have never read it. As I've said before in a previous review, to try and divorce a book as influential as this one from that context, to try and critique it outside of its own cultural impact is inherently deceitful. This book is such a pillar of culture, it's in the DNA of mountains of literature. From Ulysses and Shakespeare and Paradise Lost to movies and video games, anime and hordes of comic books. The whole concept of the invincible superhero with one weakness that can be exploited to defeat him? The Superman, the Conans, Captain America, Wolverine, trace their heritage to this tale. In many ways people think that Homelander is a deconstruction of Superman, but in reality, it's simply Superman being taken back to his roots. Back to Achilles. The invincible berserker harnessed for politics and ambition, who is both invulnerable and weakness personified. The ultimate man of men. The hero, broken in two by his own emotions. The unstoppable warrior of warriors who can defy kings and single-handily bring an entire country to its knees. Who stands on the sidelines of a battle until the very last moment, returning too late, but bringing with him hell itself. The passionate bastard who is sometimes a dangerous, emotionally immature man-child, other times an unstoppable feral lunatic who can terrify even the mightiest of opponents. A man who hits the battlefield like a comet, who when he screams his war-cry for the death of Patroclus, his fury lights up the night sky for miles. Achilles is one of the best and most influential protagonists in the history of fiction. He has the hubris of Milton's Lucifer, the delusion of Ahab, he is as mad as Hamlet, as haunted as Macbeth, as bloodthirsty as Titus, as fragile and self-absorbed as Charles Arrowby. He spits in the face of authority and power, even (ultimately) defying the will of the gods. And he pays a terrible, tragic price for his myopic rage. Achilles, the strongest of all heroes, the king of all warriors, who's doomed, fated to have his name become synonymous with weakness itself. The Achilles Heel. Re-reading the Iliad and going back to re-read Joyce, Moby-Dick, the Lord of the Rings and Paradise Lost in the same year has been a very instructive education. How writers like Milton and Tolkien (and Melville and Joyce) were trying to create their own take on myths and how much of that work is owed to Homer. Not just the gods and the hubris. But the poetry. The symmetry of different myths. That classic method of constructing fantasy, where tales branch off into tangents describing side characters and armour and rivers and locations, filling in the past history of the story as it is being told. Using myth as a sort of universal relational platform for all these stories to interact. This kind of storytelling has been passed down to everything from Shakespeare to religion, to politics, to Marvel comics, to Dungeons and Dragons and video games and anime. I think every person who loves fantasy books and comic books absolutely should read the Iliad. To see the heritage of this storytelling. Where it comes from. Why it's built the way it is and why certain ideas keep on coming back over and over in heroic fiction. Why we're attracted to the tale of the flawed invincible hero. The importance of focusing on that closing page in history, where empires fall and dynasties topple. Where single mistakes by influential and powerful men can doom whole civilisations. This is a story of gods and history and champions and arrogance and comeuppance and friendship and the self-destructive nature of every war. How Achilles, the very symbol of all warriors becomes a personal treatise about the flaws of war itself. How war destroys the heroes it creates. Corrupts them with the promises of glory and vengeance and power and defiles everything. This is not hidden, it's not subtext, when Athena (goddess of wisdom) drags Ares (the god of war) off the battlefield Zeus himself berates Ares (and so berates war itself), insults, degrades and dismisses it as not only the enemy of all men, but the enemy of all things good and noble. The story of the Trojan War is itself a Trojan horse for a tale about the fall of heroes, kings, nations and the terrible calamity and mistake of war. But more than that. You should read The Iliad to just enjoy it. Even if you know every beat of this story off by heart. It is worth reading. Give yourself a chance to connect to that history. Beyond what you can learn from it. Beyond the message of the story. It can be transcendent to just experience it. To sit down and take it in and allow yourself to be swept up in this ancient tale that has been passed down for centuries and survived the decimation of its own culture. This tale has been speaking to us in the voices of hundreds of our favourite characters and creations. Echoes of it falling down through the history of our storytelling tradition. From our ancestors to the modern day. A spectrum reflected through many different windows. Over thousands of years. Like the light of a distant star travelling for centuries and finally reaching us. I see the chance to read The Iliad as a privilege. Because it is. 10/10 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 06, 2024
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May 15, 2024
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Jan 06, 2023
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Paperback
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0143039954
| 9780143039952
| 0143039954
| 3.83
| 1,157,934
| -700
| Oct 31, 2006
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 17, 2024
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May 15, 2024
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Jan 06, 2023
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Paperback
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1534449922
| 9781534449923
| 1534449922
| 4.06
| 4,017
| Apr 09, 2019
| Apr 09, 2019
|
it was amazing
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Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds is the best book I've read this year. It's not a competition, art isn't a race, but Nathan Ballingrud has won and I'm poppin Nathan Ballingrud's Wounds is the best book I've read this year. It's not a competition, art isn't a race, but Nathan Ballingrud has won and I'm popping the champagne in advance. I mean ...god damn. If you love horror and you enjoy reading, this guy should be on every single one of your radars. He has the intensity of a Cormac McCarthy, the symbolic power of an Alejandro Jodorowsky, the assaulting poetic imagination of a Phil Tippett and the monstrous humanity of a Guillermo del Toro. He's a total package nightmare machine. This book has the most vivid imagery I have ever read in a novel. And I just read Naked Lunch. I don't know if Nathan's publishers lined the pages with Dimethylsulfoxide or something, because when I read this book I could taste the imagery. Taste it. There's vivid and then there's realistic and then there's whatever the hell WOUNDS is doing. I felt the ashes in my mouth when a character is slammed face-first into a bunch of cigarette butts. I could feel the close humidity of a swamp on my skin as I passed by plants with human faces and terrified eyes budding on the lines of Virginia creepers. I could smell the decay and electricity in the air in a room with a living corpse with wounds that were a gate for a celestial being. I could hear hundreds of colonies of cockroaches and maggots buzzing under the floor-boards. Singing a melancholy tune as a ghoul with a patchwork skull and a borrowed tongue mourned their lost romance to a girl with a head that blossomed open like a flower. I could see and feel the heat radiating off of the shores of hell itself as I watched my ship approach the monolithic body of a dead angel splayed across the landscape of a nightmare. Wounds is a collection of six short stories that are connected and yet stand alone. And this collection is magnificent. Hallucinatory. It speaks in a voice that I recognise my from PTSD night terrors. These stories have the artistry of a Dark Souls and old school Clive Barker. A sort of obsidian fantasy style that isn't 'grim' or 'dark', but instead is gleeful and bright and insane and obscene. Imagination like daggers of black glass forged in the mouth of a volcano. I've mentioned this before, but there's an old, cheap criticism that says real horror is never seen. That what's inside the head of the audience is scarier than anything an artist or writer could ever visualise. In the case of a lot of artists and writers that is true. In the case of Nathan Ballingrud? No. It is absolutely not true. Imagination wise, I am not in his league. I am not batting for his team. I am in a completely different sport. If we all had the imagination of Nathan Ballingrud we wouldn't need video games or 600 million dollar CGI blockbusters. If we all had dreams this large and immersive we would not need the world itself. Our entertainment industry would collapse and the owners of Disney would be out on the street with a tin-cup begging for change and sandwiches. We would be a race of strange dreamers throwing ourselves into apocalypses in a field of flowers and tasting personal and planetary Armageddon in every drop of beer. Our cars would rust out in their parking lots as we danced into the midnight hour to the song of our inner horror. It would be a glorious utopia. But it is not one that currently exists. Unfortunately. Perhaps in time and with sufficient genetic modification it might be possible. But at the moment we have to rely on visionaries like Nathan Ballingrud to play the pied piper and lead us like lemmings through the thickets of hell. To build maps written in human flesh to guide us to the sights and tourist hot spots of our broken souls. To show us the humanity in the worst of places and ideas, and the immense celestial power in our fragile mortality. We need visionary artists and writers to teach us to listen to the songs hidden in our trauma. The glorious cacophony that pours from our busted lips and broken hearts. To show us the music waiting to be born in our WOUNDS. Now. Empty your pockets for Nathan Ballingrud. 11.5/10 Yes, this book has broken free from my rating system. Because art is chaos and magic and cannot be contained. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 20, 2023
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Jul 30, 2023
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Dec 23, 2022
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Hardcover
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0679740732
| 9780679740735
| 0679740732
| 4.02
| 7,821
| 1975
| Jan 31, 1995
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it was amazing
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A great novel doesn't judge its characters. It reveals them. Light Years is a revelation. It is a book of with slick humour, candid moments of life and A great novel doesn't judge its characters. It reveals them. Light Years is a revelation. It is a book of with slick humour, candid moments of life and insight, slices of wild sex and absurdity and one of the best character studies I've ever read. It is a book that requires patience. Its punchy sentence structure is like Thomas Wolfe at his best. It will test your endurance. It is both succinct and theatrical, mirroring the themes of difficult reality clashing with dreamy expectations of life that run throughout the novel. There are moments when you need to put Light Years down and think about it for awhile. Some books leave you with a lot to consider after 500 pages. Light Years leaves you contemplating with a single sentence. A single vivid description. Like the best novels ever written it is both easy and heavy. When it hits just right it can both lift you up and weigh you down. Light Years doesn't judge marriage, so much as it exposes the inherent human difficulty of relationships. How people need each other so much and yet clash with each other so easily. How relationships echo the superficiality of the life we dream of living versus the harsh complexity of the life we must live. And how these different lives entangle in marriage and can ultimately become embodied in our children. Relationships are by their nature, consensual. So when we feel forced into it, or obliged to have one to meet some kind of societal appearance of 'normalcy' that's gonna be the core of a lot of unhappiness and resentment in our lives. AND IT IS. But two people's inability to remain together doesn't mean a relationship isn't a good thing or even the best thing they can ever experience. Light Years shows that the problem with relationships is that people see them within these short-sighted paradigms of 'success' and 'failure'. Where often what we accomplish in a relationship can be bigger and have a longer lasting impact then our own lifespans. In many ways having a relationship is realising your life is about more than just you. Sometimes two knees touching under a table can change our world. We are often made to see relationships as some black and white binary that either works or doesn't and this is a misunderstanding of the value of love. Or even just fun sex. Understanding a partner can often mean that you realise why they're not right for you. And that can be a good relationship, even if it has to end. It doesn't mean you or your partner have failed, or that everything you had is meaningless or that you're bad people. In fact it can be quite the contrary. Relationships have more value then just domestic bliss or the appearance of a stable partnership. That's why we can sometimes look back on lost love with a sense of nostalgia and appreciation for what we've learned. Holding on to something that's hurting both people isn't always healthy or a sign of an enduring love. It's often like holding onto a dream that has long since ended. Letting go can be vital to caring about other people. And maturing. James Salter was a poet and a bit of a puck. His writing is inspired and flirtatious. His work was often accused of being mischievous even in his 80s. Some people saw that as a bad thing. I see it as a wonderful thing. His work was sexy, clever and above all obsessed with people. Not afraid of our imperfections but infatuated by them. Constantly wanting to explore them and draw them out. Tease them into the light. Not to judge, but to reveal. ALSO: TORTOISE. 10/10 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 11, 2023
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Jun 25, 2023
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Dec 11, 2022
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Paperback
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0747589488
| 9780747589488
| 0747589488
| 3.49
| 16,766
| Dec 1997
| Jan 05, 2009
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it was amazing
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The cardinal rule of dating past your 30s: If they're way out of your league and really interested? RED FLAG. The cardinal rule of dating past your 30s: If they're way out of your league and really interested? RED FLAG. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 03, 2022
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Dec 08, 2022
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Dec 03, 2022
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
4.14
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it was amazing
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Jul 08, 2024
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Jun 12, 2024
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3.82
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it was amazing
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Apr 20, 2024
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Apr 08, 2024
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3.53
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it was amazing
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Mar 14, 2024
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Feb 20, 2024
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3.95
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it was amazing
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Apr 03, 2024
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Feb 11, 2024
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3.80
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it was amazing
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Apr 27, 2024
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Oct 06, 2023
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3.96
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it was amazing
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Dec 29, 2021
not set
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Jul 13, 2023
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3.96
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it was amazing
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not set
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Jul 12, 2023
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3.80
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it was amazing
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May 22, 2024
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Jul 05, 2023
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3.46
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it was amazing
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Jul 09, 2023
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Jun 30, 2023
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4.43
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it was amazing
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Jul 05, 2023
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Jun 23, 2023
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4.07
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it was amazing
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Jun 14, 2023
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Jun 09, 2023
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3.93
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it was amazing
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Jun 18, 2023
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Jun 08, 2023
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4.34
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it was amazing
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Jan 10, 2024
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Apr 15, 2023
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3.45
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it was amazing
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Mar 27, 2023
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Mar 16, 2023
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3.97
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it was amazing
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Feb 06, 2023
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Jan 23, 2023
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3.92
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it was amazing
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May 15, 2024
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Jan 06, 2023
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3.83
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it was amazing
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May 15, 2024
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Jan 06, 2023
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4.06
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it was amazing
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Jul 30, 2023
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Dec 23, 2022
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4.02
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it was amazing
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Jun 25, 2023
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Dec 11, 2022
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3.49
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it was amazing
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Dec 08, 2022
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Dec 03, 2022
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